Midworld
Reviewed date: 2025 Mar 27
Rating: 4
213 pages
Trees
I have a particular fondness for stories about people (human or otherwise) living in giant trees. The trees in Midworld are only 700 meters tall, nothing like the two-mile tall trees on Kashyyyk, but it's a solid story nonetheless. Other stories with tall trees include:
- Hothouse by Brian Aldiss
- Doomtime by Doris Piserchia
- Earth in Twilight Doris Piserchia
- Various Star Wars books including Heir to the Empire Timothy Zahn
- The Thing in the Attic by James Blish, part of The Seedling Stars
"World of a chlorophyllous god"
The setting is an unnamed planet covered by a dense globe-spanning forest of 700-meter tall trees. The denizens of this world live in the trees, in seven levels that comprise seven biomes, from the Upper Hell of the first level to the Lower Hell of the seventh and deepest level. It's a green world, a vegetable world, a world where life proliferates and overflows.
Home tree and furcots
A human colony ship went astray and stranded its people on this unnamed jungle planet. Unable to maintain any level of technology or civilization, the people abandoned their things and took to the trees. They learned to live in harmony with the trees. They found a Home Tree, large enough to house a whole village. They received help from the furcots, mysterious six-legged creatures native to the planet. Furcots and humans developed a pair-bond: every human has a life-long companion furcot.
Now, generations later, knowledge of their origins is lost to history. The only relic of their past is a metal axehead, ceremonially held by the village leader. The people live in the Third Level, and only the bravest ascend to the First Level, the Upper Hell. Nobody has ever descended to the Seventh Level, the Lower Hell, which is the surface. They live and hunt and emfol with the world. They have known no other way.
Emfol?
Emfolling is a mental communion with nature. These people are really in tune with nature. Midway through the book one character muses that perhaps the word emfol derived from the words empathy and foliage. Empathetic foliation. Emfol.
Born
Born is far from the Home Tree, hunting with his furcot Ruumahum. He hopes to come home with a big catch so he can impress a young girl named Brightly Go and steal her affections away from his rival, Losting.
Born's hunt is successful: he bags a large grazer. He also observes a large something made of metal (like the axehead) fall from the sky and crash into the world.
The metal demon
Brightly Go is less impressed with the grazer than Born had hoped. That and his curiosity impels Born to undertake an even more impressive task: finding the metal demon that fell from the sky. Several men from the village accompany him, including (to Born's frustration) his rival Losting. But when they find the metal demon, it's all the way down in the Fifth Level. All except Born turn back. It's only Born who descends to the Fifth Level, observes the metal "demon" up close, and rescues two giants from inside it.
Kimi Logan and Jan Cohoma
The giants (who are regular-sized people; Born's people have decreased in average size since they went arboreal) introduce themselves as Kimi Logan and Jan Cohoma. Their skimmer crashed into the canopy, and they could sure use Born's help getting back to the Company's home base. They don't explain to Born that the Company is on this planet to extract various valuable resources from the native plant life. They also don't explain to Born that the Company's presence on the planet is also quite illegal under Commonwealth law, so…you know, there's no way this is going to end well.
Born--and Losting!
Born takes Logan and Cohoma back to the Home Tree. There's a council, and while everybody is welcoming to the giants, in the end, the giants' home base is too far from the Home Tree. Nobody has ever traveled that far, and once again it's only Born who decides to go. Born--and Losting!
Akadi: hog-sized army ants
The troupe of Born, Losting, Logan, and Cohoma are on the move for just a few days when they encounter a train of Akadi headed toward the Home Tree. The Akadi are like army ants, if army ants were the size of large hogs. Imagine a miles-long chain of hog-sized army ants eating everything in their path. This is an existential threat. If the Akadi reach the Home Tree, they'll eat right through the trunk and kill the tree. They hurry back Home and the whole village prepares to fight the Akadi. Logan and Cohoma don't understand why the people don't just abandon their Home and find another Home Tree somewhere else. Why give their lives to save a big vegetable? But the people see no other choice. Their Home isn't just a tree, it's a part of them. They care for the Home as much as it cares for them. They will stay and fight to the bitter end.
After a day of hard fighting, the Akadi retreat during the night. They'll be back in the morning. But--oh joy! While the village has been fighting to defend their Home, Born has been off on a special mission. He returns, chased by another line of Akadi. He directs this second Akadi line into the first line of Akadi, and the two armies destroy each other. The Home Tree is saved.
Silverslith and the Lower Hell
Born, Losting, Logan, and Cohoma set out again. This time they encounter a huge silverslith, and to escape it they take a desperate gamble: they descend all the way to the seventh level, the Lower Hell. The surface is mostly covered in water, a huge lake out of which the great trees grow. Born and Losting are out of their element, and it's Logan and Cohoma who know how to build a raft. They travel in this Stygian abyss for miles, finally ascending once again into the relative comfort of the upper levels.
Hansen and burls
They reach the Company base. It's a large metal platform resting on the sheared-off trunks of three great trees. Logan and Cohoma introduce Born and Losting to Hansen, the head of the Company's operations. It quickly becomes clear to Born and Losting that all Hansen and the Company are interested in is extracting resources from the planet. They don't care about the wholesale destruction that their harvesting methods will cause.
Stormtreader and photoids
The Company must be stopped. And here is the first place I had a real problem with the story. Alan Dean Foster pulls a deus ex machina. Born goes and grabs something that Foster has not introduced before: a tendril hanging from a stormtreader tree. He drags it over and lays it up against the metal platform of the Company's outpost. When lightning strikes during the night storm, the stormtreader tendril conducts the full power of the lightning bolt directly into the station. Boom! All electrical systems are fried and a whole lot of people die. Then, the noise of the destruction attracts some large floating photoids, which attack the station. The surviving Company staff try to fight them off, but that succeeds only in enraging the photoids and ensuring the complete destruction of the outpost.
Now, that could be a fantastic and satisfying resolution to the plot if the stormtreader tree or the photoids had ever been properly introduced prior to this point. There weren't. The stormtreader was mentioned by name only once prior to this, and its lightning-rod properties were never even alluded to. The photoids literally never came up until the end. You can't invent new things to get your heroes out of a tight spot. You have to lay the groundwork beforehand.
This is so disappointing.
Losting wins
One more thing. Losting dies in the final battle. Born wins Brightly Go's heart. (Actually he'd won it earlier before Losting's death, so this is a satisfactory resolution to that plot point.) Losting is buried in the traditional way, by being entombed in a tree crevice. His consciousness merges with the forest, which (in no surprise) is a planet-spanning collective mind. Oh, and also, furcots are vegetable creatures, as it turns out. They hatch out of tree buds.
Midworld?
The planet is never called Midworld. It's called a "world with no name," and indeed it is never named. The term Midworld is used only in the book title and in the blurb on the back cover. Presumably it's Midworld because Born and his people live in the middle layers of the foliage rather than in the upper canopy or down near the forest floor.